by Shadowman » Mon Feb 02, 2009 1:03 am
- Motto: "May God have mercy on my enemies, because I sure as hell won't."
Good idea: Getting the demo for F.E.A.R. 2 to try it out, as I liked the previous games.
Bad idea: Playing it after dark.
Having played and subsequently wet myself during FEAR and Extraction Point, I decided, despite not wanting to subject myself to Alma's tortures any further, to try the FEAR 2 demo.
This game does not see Extraction Point or Perseus Mandate as canon. However, you do not play as the Point Man. It's supposed to begin thirty minutes before the end of the original FEAR, but the Demo begins just after the Explosion.
The Demo starts with a narration by what I assume is everyone's favorite cannibal, Paxton Fettel, detailing how Alma last saw sunlight when she was eight, and lived a horrible life of pain and misery.
You begin in the middle of the street, charred cars and wrecked buildings surround you, while the Younger Alma stands over you, promptly vanishing. Continuing along, you may notice how the city is being devoured by a large tree, hanging over an orange pit. Jumping in, you'll find a helicopter blade spinning just above your head.
Okay, that was Alma screwing with you. Your chopper crashed after the Explosion, and, as you may expect, your teammates are separated.
Heading into a building, you find one teammates gunned down by Replicas, despite, despite that, given Extraction Point isn't canon, Fettel should be dead. Oh well, nab your fallen ally's gun and get shootin'.
In a brief gunfight between you and Replicas, you may notice their armor sparking when you shoot them, which I found to be a nice touch.
Continuing on, you find yourself in a school. Or is it? Notes have been left lying around detailing genetic experiments on the children. This is Armacham we're talking about, sick but not surprising.
You hear a woman crying--Is that ever a good sign?--and one of your teammates says that "she just wants to be with her child!" Hrm, who would be school age, in a blown up, haunted city, and want to be with her chi--Oh crap.
Then it happens, Elder Alma makes the scene, only appearing extremely briefly, just enough to know it's her. She sends Ghosts after you, which go down in only a few shots as usual. Unlike the last games, they now appear as mist with static inside, much like the points in the other games that would signal an incoming Hallucination, but with vaguely human shapes inside.
Following that, you find your teammate, who attacks you, screaming "you can't have her!" And clearly insane. He gets slammed into a wall by an unseen force, and pulled into a street, with no body in sight.
After a brief walk down the subway, you end up on the city street, braving Replicas and a few suits of powered armor, and a few brief shots of Alma. Another ally says he sees a woman in trouble, and tries to help her. I didn't catch anything to suggest he's killed--it may very well have been someone in trouble--but it's probably Alma.
Okay, that's all fine and dandy. Then you come upon a suit of powered armor standing in the street. Your first instinct will be to shoot it--hell, that's what I did. But walking up to it, you'll notice that it has an open cockpit...and a prompt for you to get in.
Oh hell yes.
The powered armor is fantastic. You can breeze through Replica squads like nobody's business. Hell, even other powered armors aren't so bad. After running around for a while, the Demo ends.
So that's what happens. And...it was FEAR, for better or for worse. Even though I played the console version, and console games are usually much less frighting than PC games, this Demo still got under my skin like it's brothers. Alma briefly pops up, basically just to say "I'm still here, drop your guard and I'll melt your eyeballs!"
And it was good. Really good. But I'm going to avoid it, not because I didn't like it--I loved it--but because these games are too damn much for me. I will get it, when I can play in a brightly lit room with a crack team of doctors to keep me from keeling over when Elder Alma decides I haven't been scared enough.
[ Click to attempt signal recovery... ]
